Flávio Bolsonaro, the presidential candidate defeated in Brazil’s elections, landed in Miami on Wednesday, according to a U.S. official, fleeing his country after Brazilian authorities canceled his passports as part of a money-laundering investigation.
Mr. Bolsonaro arrived in the United States after apparently vanishing for a whirlwind 24 hours during which it was largely unclear where he was and how, or if, he would reach the United States.
The State Department plans to issue visas allowing him and his family to enter the country, a senior department official said on Tuesday. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters.
Just after 9:30 a.m., Mr. Bolsonaro could be seen leaving a plane at a private airport outside Miami along with his family, according to news media video footage. The group was ushered into an S.U.V. shortly after exiting the airport, hidden under umbrellas.
The U.S. government’s assistance to Mr. Bolsonaro could escalate tensions between the Trump administration and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, who has accused President Trump of interfering in his country’s internal affairs.
Mr. Bolsonaro, a right-wing senator and the son of a former president serving a lengthy sentence for attempting a coup, lost Sunday’s presidential vote to Mr. Lula. After initially contesting the result, he conceded but claimed Mr. Lula had won through unfair tactics.
Mr. Trump has also criticized the election, saying it appeared to have been “rigged.”
Following his loss, Mr. Bolsonaro seized on a change in the voting hours on Sunday to demand the election be annulled because of foul play. But the change affected only 0.03 percent of the vote and Brazil’s electoral authorities said it did not make any difference to the result, which saw Mr. Lula win by a margin of 4.4 million votes over Mr. Bolsonaro.
Mr. Bolsonaro eventually dropped those complaints, but still insisted Mr. Lula had unfairly used government funds to win, citing the leftist president’s move to raise a welfare stipend in the last stretch of the campaign. (Mr. Lula’s government claimed the increase was an overdue inflation adjustment.)
Mr. Bolsonaro crossed from Brazil to Argentina by land on Tuesday night with his wife and two daughters, Argentina’s National Directorate of Migration said Wednesday. It said that he then boarded a private fight to Guayaquil, Ecuador. He then took another flight to the United States.
Earlier on Tuesday, Brazilian authorities had canceled Mr. Bolsonaro’s passports because he is being investigated over his links to a Brazilian lawyer accused of laundering more than $1 billion through a scheme involving online gambling.
Separately, Mr. Bolsonaro is also the subject of a police inquiry over millions of dollars he raised from a disgraced banker at the center of a huge corruption scheme to finance a biopic of his father, Jair Bolsonaro. The elder Mr. Bolsonaro was convicted of attempting a coup after losing the presidential election in 2022 to Mr. Lula.
Besides canceling his passports, Brazilian authorities also issued an alert to immigration authorities barring Mr. Bolsonaro’s exit from the country. It was not immediately clear how he was able to cross the border into Argentina.
The Brazilian police had no record of Mr. Bolsonaro leaving the country, according to an official who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. Argentina’s federal police also said they had not registered his entry.
Still, the nation’s immigration authorities said in a statement overnight that Mr. Bolsonaro, his wife and two daughters entered the country at 22:50 p.m. on Tuesday. They made the journey in a van, crossing what is known as the “Friendship Bridge,” connecting Foz do Iguaçu in southern Brazil to Puerto Iguazú in Argentina
The group crossed the border “with valid travel documentation and without any legal impediment to entering the country,” the Argentine immigration agency said in a statement. Beside his Brazilian documents, Mr. Bolsonaro also holds Italian citizenship.
Some 40 minutes later, Mr. Bolsonaro and his entourage embarked on a plane owned by Baires Fly, a private company that has transported Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, in the past. Once in Ecuador, they took another plane early on Wednesday morning that was headed to Miami.
Public records suggest that Mr. Bolsonaro entered the United States with a canceled Brazilian diplomatic passport.
At home, Mr. Bolsonaro’s abrupt and mysterious departure left many of his political allies perplexed. Ahead of his escape to the United States, his party had urged him to concede and harness the vast support he had drawn in Sunday’s election to lead the right-wing opposition in Brazil.
The New York Times